Omar Minaya and Theo Epstein spoke at a round table
discussion over the weekend and the subject of Latin American player development came up. This was fun:

While many big-name players have emerged from the Dominican Republic,
the highly touted athletes often are kept out of baseball games and
kept in training facilities, thus explaining the tendency of Dominican
prospects to be more raw than most minor-leaguers. Buscones, which are
similar to agents in the Dominican Republic, take the talented children
(as young as 10 years old, according to Minaya and Epstein) and have
them fine-tune their stills through drills. This hinders their baseball
thinking so much that Epstein recalled a player that the Red Sox had
given $500,000 to that they soon realized did not understand what a
force out was.

Of course, given the fact that the Red Sox haven’t produced a single Latin American prospect of note under Theo Epstein maybe this anecdote says more about the Sox’ Latin American scouts than it says about the habits of Dominican kids and the buscones who find them.

A lot of teams do funny promo videos during spring training. The Seattle Mariners have led the league in this category for years now, with their marketing and p.r. folks producing and a lot of game and sometimes hammy players starring in some excellent clips. They’re doing them again this year, if you’re curious.

The Milwaukee Brewers have hopped on the humor train in 2018, and their latest entry in this category of commercials is excellent. It’s their riff on “The Sandlot.”

The biggest difference: Smalls really could kill you in this one. Brett Phillips is a lot more jacked than the kid who played Scotty in the original was.